A customer education blueprint that drives growth
Shannon Howard shares her customer education blueprint that drives customer success, retention, and growth.
Customer education is key to driving customer success, retention, and growth. But where do you start when launching a customer education program?
Today, Shannon Howard (Director of Customer and Content Marketing at Intellum) shares 5 tips for successfully launching and running a customer education program:
1. Align customer education goals to your business goals.
Tie your customer education objectives back to overarching company goals around retention, expansion, and advocacy. Education for the sake of education won't drive results.
“A thoughtful education strategy that starts with business goals, thinks about and considers the audience or audiences that you're going to be educating, and builds from there. A lot of people think content first and then kind of try to tie it to other things. It should be the other way around.”
2. Identify your customer education gaps.
Analyze support tickets, customer feedback, and usage data to pinpoint knowledge gaps. What are common issues or problems your customers face? What are their ultimate goals?
"When I'm looking at customer education programs, I first do research. What are people talking about in the company's customer slack community? What's coming up in conversations with our relationship managers? What is the sales team hearing when they're talking to people? Then, I figure out how we can answer those questions for people."
3. Create content that maps to your customer education goals.
The next step is to fill the knowledge gaps with content that helps you achieve your business goals. Focus on creating content that drives behavior change through learning. This could be training, courses, help articles etc. The goal is to get customers to adopt and properly use your product.
"Customer education professionals are looking at how do we drive behavior change through this learning. I want to make sure that the content I'm producing is useful and relevant and educational in some way."
4. Measure the ROI of your customer education programs.
One way to track the ROI of your customer education programs is to analyze engagement, retention, and expansion rates for customers who completed your customer education programs versus those who have not.
"Typically you're looking at those kind of trained versus untrained involved with education versus uninvolved in education. Are they more likely to retain? Are they more likely to expand? Are they more likely to use more of your product and even advocacy?"
5. Tap into an existing community.
Online communities provide insights into education needs and opportunities for thought leadership. Are there existing communities for your industry, product, or target audience?
"There are already communities of practice out there that have thousands of people and maybe they're not customers, but then you're getting actually this broad swath of people. What are problems they face? What questions do they have? What are some pain points in the industry?"
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
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